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A webhost must satiate some quintessential requisites of hosting. Every webhost will have a plethora of plans and will put forth a myriad of features. You have to cut through these propositions and focus on the most significant elements. Choosing a quality hosting provider is not a difficult task when you know what to assess and compare. Here is a brief guide that will help you to choose the best hosting provider based on your needs.

You can choose shared or dedicated hosting. Shared hosting is cheaper. Dedicated hosting is more reliable but it is often too costly for small to medium businesses, especially startups. Shared hosting has its merits and demerits. The first element you should focus on is uptime. It doesn’t matter what plan you opt for, how much bandwidth you need and what kind of features the webhost offers. Nothing will be of any use if the webhost fails in ensuring uptime. Many webhosts promise 99.9% uptime and some even guarantee 100% uptime. Find out if a webhost actually ensures that kind of uptime. You may have a ton of great features but your website may not be live if the webhost doesn’t have the infrastructure and expertise to keep the servers live and running at all times.

The second element to focus on is if the webhost delivers exactly what it promises. There are numerous instances wherein a hosting company has offered unlimited bandwidth but has capped it nonetheless. Don’t fall for promises that the hosting companies wouldn’t honor. Companies like HawkHost deliver on their promises. Very few will actually tell you what they would deliver. It is easy to oversell, hard to over deliver. This doesn’t just apply to bandwidth or storage from wpengine, but also to customer service and more. If a hosting company can only offer live support for twelve hours, then they should not claim to have live chat or email support twenty four hours a day. It is easier for everyone to do their job when the claims are not hyped up.

The third element is scalability. Any hosting company with average infrastructure would be able to offer you reasonable storage. You need to know if the hosting company can offer scalability, from 1TB storage to 5TB for instance, from 100 emails to 500 emails or perhaps from normal antivirus security to SSL certification. As you grow your business, you would need to make your online presence formidable. That wouldn’t happen with adequate support from your hosting provider.